Those who can, do
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, teach teachers.

I don’t know whether there’s evidence for any of these statements: it seems unlikely.  It’s the last that intrigues me, although I want to reverse the emphasis: do the best teachers make the best teacher educators?  If not, who does?

Teachers who become teacher educators take on new challenges.  They must explain how students learn, identify teachers’ needs and support their improvement, offer training and influence school culture.  Could a teacher educator offer effective training, even if they had not been a great teacher themselves?  Research offers little guidance: “Commonsense reasoning tells us that quality teacher education relies on quality teacher educators”, but “there is minimal attention to what teacher educators should know and be able to do (Lin Goodwin et al., 2014, p.284).”  This post looks for hints outside education on how skilled a teacher a teacher educator must be.

Being effective may not help you make others effective…

The Peter Principle suggests that everyone ‘rise to their level of incompetence’.  It arises “when the skills that make someone successful at one job level don’t translate to success in the next level.”  Alan Benson and colleagues used data from over two hundred companies’ sales teams to test this.  They found that better salespeople were more likely to be promoted, but the better they were at sales, the worse they managed: “each higher sales rank is correlated with a 7.5% decline in the performance of each of the manager’s subordinates following the promotion.”  Other aspects of their work were more predictive: those who completed many of their sales collaboratively did become effective managers (Benson, Li and Shue, 2018).  Being great at something may not prepare us to help others become great at it.*

People often refer to football managers for further examples.  Some players had limited careers, then managed successfully, such as Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho and Gerard Houllier, who went from deputy head to player-manager and guided English and French clubs to success.  Others played impressively but managed poorly, like Bryan Robson, who was the fifth most-capped England player, but managed Middlesbrough, first to promotion, then to relegation.  Although it’s hard to draw conclusions, given the range of examples and the vagaries of football performance, this does provide examples of effective managers who were not top players, and top players who were poor managers.

But knowledge and experience matter…

But the limits of expertise in supporting others are often exaggerated.  For example, it is sometimes claimed that effective coaching is independent of knowing the coachee’s work (‘a good coach asks good questions’, for example).  A coachee who is an expert in their field may be prompted to reflect productively based on choice questions, but anyone who is not yet an expert (for the sake of argument, someone who has not enjoyed the ten years’ deliberate practice Anders Ericsson advocates (Ericsson and Pool, 2016)) is likely to need support from someone who understands their work.  (A review for the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (2012) notes the absence of evidence that coaching supports improved individual or organisational performance, although coaching behaviours, like acting as an ally to coachees, are better evidenced).  So, although a teacher educator may perhaps be effective without having been a great teacher, they must know something of teaching.

Leaders who know their field seem to outperform those who do not.  Leadership may look similar across fields (leaders communicate, think critically, solve problems) but success relies on knowledge of their field.  Effective communication varies, for example: “Doctors talking to patients must communicate information differently than politicians reacting to a natural disaster or a CEO responding to a labor dispute (Markman, 2017).”  There is even some evidence quantifying the difference: “hospital quality scores [in the US] are approximately 25% higher in physician-run hospitals than in manager-run hospitals.”  The biggest predictive factor was the “proportion of managers with a clinical degree (Stoller, Goodall and Baker, 2016).”  Stoller, Goodall and Baker suggested that expertise in the field:

  • Confers credibility
  • Allows leaders to focus on what really matters to practitioners
  • Means leaders can recognise good practice

So, you may not have to be the best in the field to lead or support others, but you do need knowledge and experience.

What does this mean for teacher educators?

This suggests that an effective teacher educator need not be a great teacher, but must be knowledgeable, experienced (and hence) credible.  For example, when coaching an individual teacher, a teacher educator must:

  • Gain the teacher’s trust
  • Identify the right priorities for the teacher/students
  • Convey key ideas and model effective practice for the teacher
  • Support the teacher’s adaption in line with the principles

This seems to rely, partly on biologically primary behaviours (like listening responsively), but substantially on the equivalent of pedagogical content knowledge for teacher educators: a grasp of classrooms and the ability to persuade others that this grasp is correct, a knowledge of learning and the skill to convey it to others, understanding of principles and knowledge of how they can be applied.

So, although an effective teacher educator need not be a great teacher, they need to be knowledgeable.  They need a repertoire of models and examples to communicate ideas.  They need a breadth of experience, to understand how principles may look different in different environments and to convey credibility (‘I know what it’s like for you in this school and department’).  Instead of seeking the best teachers to become teacher educators, perhaps we should seek those who have thought deeply and examined their teaching carefully, and have attained a breadth of experience, within or between schools.

What does this mean for the best teachers (particularly if they don’t want to become leaders)?  The analogy to pedagogical content knowledge may be helpful here too: we’d expect a maths teacher to have a good knowledge of maths, and how to convey maths to others; we would not expect the best mathematicians to make the best maths teachers (among other things, they may suffer from the curse of knowledge, finding students’ struggles hard to understand).  Perhaps the best teachers should be encouraged to stay in the classroom, or work in curriculum design.  This is the argument made for sales companies by Benson, Li and Shue (2018): pay the best salespeople to stay in sales, don’t reward them through promotion (especially since they make poor managers).  It’s also analogous to the Singaporean approach: teachers can develop as leaders, teacher educators, or curriculum designers (more here).

Conclusion

So, it seems we should encourage the best teachers to stay in the classroom (and reward them for doing so) and invite those with a deep interest in teaching and a breadth of experience to become teacher educators.

The literature is frustratingly sparse though (it’s also notable that most of the evidence I’ve cited examines leadership and management).  I’d be fascinated to see challenges, and better evidence.

* This also offers some confirmation that everyone does rise to their level of incompetence.

If you found this interesting you might like…

What makes expert teachers?

Teacher learning… it’s just learning: on what distinguishes teacher education from education.

Education in Singapore: Attracting, developing and keeping teachers

References

Benson, A., Li, D. and Shue, K. (2018). Research: Do People Really Get Promoted to Their Level of Incompetence? Harvard Business Review. 8th March.

CIPD (2012) Coaching: the evidence base

Ericsson, A., Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. London: Bodley Head.

Lin Goodwin, A., Smith, L., Souto-Manning, M., Cheruvu, R., Yin Gang, M., Reed, R., Taveras, L. (2014) What Should Teacher Educators Know and Be Able to Do? Perspectives From Practicing Teacher Educators Journal of Teacher Education 65(4) 284–302

Markman, A. (2017) Can You Be a Great Leader Without Technical Expertise? Harvard Business Review. 15th November

Stoller, J., Goodall, A., Baker, A. (2016). Why The Best Hospitals Are Managed by Doctors. Harvard Business Review. 27th December.